It was a schizophrenic day for gold and silver, which could do little right during regular trading but couldn’t be stopped in the after hours action.

The typhoon of commentary that’s blown around the world a step behind the financial tsunami that’s wrecking everything, two little words have been curiously absent: “fraud” and “swindle.” But aren’t they really at the core of what has happened? Wall Street took the whole world “for a ride” and now a handful of Wall Street’s erstwhile princelings have shifted ceremoniously into U.S. Government service to “fix” the problem with a “toolbox” containing a notional two trillion dollars.

China’s long-term prospects are so strong that even a civil war, an economic collapse or political assassinations would only temporarily delay its emergence as a worldwide economic powerhouse.

George Soros first made a name for himself with The Quantum Fund, a hedge fund that’s often described as the first real global investment fund, which he and partner Jim Rogers founded in 1970.

You don’t have to be a rabid libertarian or Marxist historian with leather patches on his jacket to look at the current world banking crisis and ask “Cui bono…?“

Of all the really bad ideas that have infested the finance business in the last 30 years, the most dangerous is probably the credit default swap (CDS).